Easier access to information via co-ethnic migrants is not only positively correlated with export from the recipient to the home countries, but also facilitates “chain migration”: it is typical for communities with a significant presence of expatriates to attract more migrants from the same communities. This feature is consistent with the preferential attachment mechanism that accurately describes the evolution of many real-world networks (from airline traffic to the World Wide Web, from social ties to financial networks) and makes migration interesting in terms of complex network analysis. Yet, not much has been written on the subject: [1]} studied clustering in US internal migration, whereas [2]} presented a stochastic radiation model that can be used to predict international migration patterns.
More recently, [3]} studied the topology of the IMN, and its evolution over the period 1960-2000. They find that the network (where links between two countries A and B are given by the stock of migrants originated in country A and living in country B in a given year) is disassortative and highly clustered, and displays a small-world binary pattern. Furthermore, they show that the structural properties of the network are mainly driven by socio-economic, geographical, and political factors.
